Has anyone ever speculated what a successful Athenian empire

>>2412584

You mean, something other than the empire Athens historically carved out?

mostly coastal colonies and cities like your pic, including sicily

probably Phoenician colonies/Egypt also if the Peloponnesian war never happened.

>>2412591
yes
pretend rome and persia are too weak to conquer them

>>2412604

It would just be a bigger Delian league, eventually falling to its own internal problems. I mean fuck, they couldn't even completely dominate all of Greece, let alone anywhere else.

It would look exactly like the League of Delfi did, only formalized. Athenians did not have the manpower needed to properly subjugate the whole of the greek world, let alone Sparta or Corinth. Also their force projection capabilities where shit.

>>2412584
The problem is that it was never much of an empire. The Roman Empire was able to absorb, incorporate and then exploit the peoples under it, and engaged them in the project by essentially bribing their local aristocrats with prestigious goods and keeping the poor relatively happy with some level of employment and the potential for citizenship and accompanying benefits.

The Athenian "empire" didn't offer anything like that and solely existed to nakedly take advantage of the dominated poleis under its control offering nothing in return like citizenship, protection etc.